After we learned that our project had been funded we immediately began ordering the parts we laid out in our budget proposal when we applied to the Catalyst Fund. We created our initial budget back in February but did not lock in prices with the majority of our suppliers.By the time we went to order, many of the components we needed had significantly increased in price—with some increasing as much as 50%. Despite our initial fears, we were able to source alternative products for all of the components that had increased in price. While we were able to find analogs for every component, the process of finding, ordering, and keeping track of over 60 different parts took a considerable amount of time. About seven hours and one call from my credit card company about alleged fraud from “unusual activity in China,” we had placed orders for all the parts needed to construct a prototype of our valve and a testing platform for it. Over the next week, our orders arrived one by one and we inventoried all of the parts.
